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Sunday, April 17, 2011
A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations: Us and Them Beyond Orientalism
Author: Arshin Adib-Moghaddam
Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd (28 Feb 2011)
Language English
ISBN-10: 1849040974
ISBN-13: 978-1849040976
Beginning with the wars of ancient Persia and Greece, Arshin Adib-Moghaddam searches for the theoretical underpinnings of the "clash of civilizations" that has determined so much of our political and cultural discourse. He revisits the Crusades, colonialism, the Enlightenment, and our contemporary war on terror, and he engages with both eastern and western thinkers, such as Adorno, Derrida, Farabi, Foucault, Hegel, Khayyam, Marcuse, Marx, Said, Ibn Sina, and Weber.
Adib-Moghaddam's investigation explains the conceptual genesis of the clash of civilizations and the influence of western and Islamic representations of the other. He highlights the discontinuities between Islamism and the canon of Islamic philosophy, which distinguishes between Avicennian and Qutbian discourses of Islam, and he reveals how violence became inscribed in western ideas, especially during the Enlightenment. Expanding critical theory to include Islamic philosophy and poetry, this metahistory refuses to treat Muslims and Europeans, Americans and Arabs, and the Orient and the Occident as separate entities.
This book seeks to dispel the myth that we have ever been embroiled in some 'clash of civilisations'. Adib-Moghaddam traverses various intellectual disciplines in order to find a pathway through the conceptual maze that has habituated us to think in 'tribal' categories. Accompanying the reader on this journey from the wars between ancient Persia and Greece, the Crusades, Colonialism and the Enlightenment to the contemporary 'wars on terror' are thinkers from 'East' and 'West': Adorno, Derrida, Farabi, Foucault, Hegel, Khayyam, Marcuse, Marx, Said, Ibn Sina, Weber. In asking where ideas such as the 'clash of civilisations' come from, and by whom they are perpetuated, Adib-Moghaddam engages with both western and Islamic representations of the 'other'. He demonstrates a) the discontinuities between 'Islamism' and the canon of classical Islamic philosophy distinguishing between 'Avicennian' and 'Qutbian' discourses of Islam, and b) how the violence inscribed in the idea of the 'West', especially during the period of the Enlightenment, continues to cast a shadow on world politics today. Expanding the geography of critical theory to include the canons of Islamic philosophy and poetry, A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations refuses to divorce Muslims from Europeans, Americans from Arabs, the Orient from the Occident. As such, it presents a frontal attack on our current cultural reality and Islamist-Western agitation against each other.
About the Author
Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is lecturer in the politics of the Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is the author of Iran in World Politics: The Question of the Islamic Republic and The International Politics of the Persian Gulf: A Cultural Genealogy.
Reviews
"This passionate and elegant work is a vigorous antidote to a constellation of
discourses steeped in the Weltanschauung that the title of Samuel Huntington's
infamous book encapsulates so well. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam's reflections are a
stimulating contribution to Edward Said's legacy of radical critique of all
essentialist constructions of otherness."
—Gilbert Achcar, author (with Noam Chomsky) of Perilous Power: The Middle East
and U.S. Foreign Policy
"What Arshin Adib-Moghaddam has done is to establish an exceptionally powerful
refutation of clashing civilizations. Eloquently, rigorously, and
imaginatively, he traces and critiques genealogies of binary and simple
oppositional thought and argues that the future of the world depends on our
accepting and understanding complexities and internal oppositions."
—Stephen Chan, School of Oriental and African Studies, 2010 International
Studies Association (ISA) Eminent Scholar in Global Development
'Eloquent, powerful, incisive and impressive in its range, A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations is a masterly work of critical deconstruction in the finest tradition of Michel Foucault and Edward Said. For anyone wishing to better understand the current state of international politics, this book is absolutely essential.' — Richard Jackson, Secretary of the British International Studies Association (BISA)
*Link for Further Reading: e-IR’s Maysam Behravesh conducted an exclusive interview with Dr Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, on his latest book: A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilizations: US and Them Beyond Orientalism: http://www.e-ir.info/?p=8424
http://www.iranreview.org/content/Documents/A_Metahistory_of_the_Clash_of_Civilisations.htm
By e-International Relations on April 27, 2011
IR’s Maysam Behravesh conducted an exclusive interview with Dr Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, on his latest book: A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilizations: US and Them Beyond Orientalism.
Dr Moghaddam is University Lecturer in Comparative and International Politics of the Middle East at SOAS, University of London. He is the author of The International Politics of the Persian Gulf: A Cultural Genealogy (Routledge: 2006, 2009), Iran in World Politics: The Question of the Islamic Republic (Columbia University Press: 2008, 2010) and A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations: Us and them beyond Orientalism (Columbia/Hurst: 2011). His writings have been translated into many languages and he is a frequent contributor to leading newspapers and TV channels around the world. He can be followed via Twitter at www.twitter.com/Adib_Moghaddam.
Let’s start from the very title of your book. It’s quite resounding, eye-catching and significant. In what terms is your work a “meta-history”? Have you meant to develop a theoretical antithesis to Huntington’s Clash Theory? And what about moving beyond us-them binary opposition?
In general, titles are misleading and sometimes they are chosen for all the wrong reasons. But I choose the term metahistory because it has a methodical significance; it indicates that the book presents a history of a History, in this case a history of the clash idea and its underlying us-versus-them dichotomy. I have been affected, as a latecomer, by Hayden White’s book: Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, which had a huge impact on historiography and critical theory as it developed between different disciplines in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His critical approach to the making of history, his emphasis on the tropes and discursive constructs that amalgamate to create ‘facts’ and historical ‘truths’ has a lot to say about the foundations of our sense of history and, to my mind, the making of national and international politics as well. I see an ‘anti-positivist’ resemblance between the thought of White, Foucault and members of the Frankfurt School, especially Theodor Adorno. It seems to me that they had quite a positive obsession with smashing foundations – historical, political, ideological or other – and a healthy suspicion towards mainstream representations of ‘history’ or ‘facts’. Much in the same spirit, A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilizations focuses on the way the clash idea could reemerge with such intense vigor in the twentieth century and why it is that it continues to be a part of our political ‘reality’ today. There seem to be an awful lot of people who believe in some inevitable clash between Islam and the west, for instance. You find them everywhere; it is not only the fascist dastard the middle class loves to present as an exception, an aberration of ‘civilized’ society. It is within the mainstream itself where the ‘other’ is sacrificed. Given that I have thought and lived between cultures, I simply wanted to understand what it is that these clash disciples are saying and how it is that they continue to advocate xenophobia and fear, especially among the middle class. So I thought it logical to go back to the way our history has been written for us, and maybe to show that some of this is really science fiction, inventions of a specific period or mind.
Are we living in a post-orientalist era? In what ways if so?
Edward Said has given us some important answers about what went wrong in the ‘west’. But he didn’t say much about the trajectories in the ‘east’. And yet, it seems to me that ‘Orientalism’ and ‘Occidentalism’ need, beget and reinforce each other. Both are involved in a self-validating dialectic. Hence, I wanted to charter instances of ‘othering’ in both discourses. Indeed, I think there has been a rather salient image of Europe and the United States, especially in modern Islamic political thought which is why I focused on the emergence of the ‘west’ from that perspective as well.
You have cautioned that a range of political elements including academics, politicians and journalists have “habituated us to believe in the normality of conflict between ‘us’ and ‘them’.” Do you have any specific group in mind who take the clash idea for granted and thus offer strategies for confrontation with the demonized “Other”? Are there any political school or party where one may detect a denser distribution of such elements and a stronger presence of such dispositions? And why in your opinion do they continuously propound and promote the notion of an irreversible clash between potentially competing universalist modernities?
One could refer to the obvious candidates, what is rightly called the ‘ultra rightwing’ in Europe: someone like Geert Wilders who has made a political career out of his clash of civilizations rhetoric. Last year in Germany, Thilo Sarrazin, a former board member of the Bundesbank and mainstream politician, published a bestselling book arguing the degenerative effects of Muslim/Turkish/Arab immigration to Germany. The book sold nearly 2 million copies and Sarrazin was paraded as the new ‘Volksheld’ or national hero in the mainstream media of the country. Today, Muslims are the only topic about which such obviously racist material can be published with great fanfare. There are resurgent right-wing parties in Sweden, Denmark, Italy, France and eastern Europe. For them, Islamophobia is a convenient way to secure votes. They preach the clash between ‘Islam’ and the ‘west’ on a daily basis. In the United States, there is an equally disturbing anti-Islamic disposition among some quarters of the neo-conservatives and ultra-Zionist lobbyists. Ultimately, Islamophobia is a convenient way to conduct successful politics these days. It would be naïve, however, to think that belief in the inherent difference between ‘Islam’ and the ‘west’ and the inferiority of the former are confined to the fringes of society or to political extremists. Bestselling doyens of the literary world such as Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis have also made their voices heard, and very loudly indeed. We can find influential adherents to the ‘clash of civilization’ in all strata of society, in the media, in politics, in academia. And of course, there is the mirror image to all of this: the clash disciples of the Islamic world, who have also had a stake in perpetuating the myth of an inevitable and perennial conflict between ‘Islam’ and the ‘west’, as if there exists something like a coherent Islamic world or a ‘west’ that is homogenous, mono-cultural, ethnically cleansed. This consensus is one of the main reasons why today the geography of violence is truly global; we are all suffering from it. Ultimately, inter-cultural dialogue and multi-civilizational hybridity are the common enemies of the clash disciples here and there, which is why they continuously hold on to the myths of separate origins and essentialized identities. I wanted to disturb some of those ensconced territories in the book. I mean where do we establish the boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’ these days, if not within that entirely hybrid area where our common humanity overlaps? I refuse to deny that common humanity of Arabs, Muslims, Americans, Germans, Iranians, Chinese, Hindus etc.
What is that Foucaultian “regime of truth” underpinning Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” theory? How have you endeavoured to challenge it? And what are the major characteristics of knowledge claims and power practices in the age of terror, fear, uncertainty and instability?
One of the main hypotheses of the book is that the theory of a clash of civilizations as it appears to us today is one of the many surface effects of a larger constellation that suggests what is essentially a myth: that there exists an inevitable clash between us and them in general and ‘Islam’ and the ‘west’ in particular. A regime of truth delivering an idea such as the clash governs its own claims which are entirely fictitious once they are analyzed and deconstructed from a meta-historical perspective. This means that our thinking about the ‘other’ is shaped by that colossal cultural constellation, what I call the clash regime, rather than ‘our’ and ‘their’ actual qualities. To put it simply, it is not that some clash between Islam and the ‘west’ is a reality, but that there exists a cultural system which suggests that we are embroiled in that conflict: If no one believes in the clash of civilizations it would cease to exist – it is as trivial as that. Some would say, why writing a book about it then? Because the case for war against the other is professionally dispersed through all layers of society on a continuous basis. People are reminded that the barbarian other is out there to get us, they are made to believe that there is a constant threat to ‘our way of life’. Incidentally, this is the phrase that Tony Blair used in his testimony to the Chilcot enquiry into the war in Iraq, not in order to address the humanitarian catastrophe the invasion caused but to make a case for confrontation with Iran. So, I don’t think we can afford the luxury of silence. There needs to be resistance to the bin Ladens and Geert Wilders’ of this world and the prejudiced cultural system that they feed on. So one challenge of the book had to be to show how this highly salient cultural constellation accentuating conflict came about historically.
Do you mean to say that this is the central thesis or proposition of your book?
In essence, I was trying to look into that transmission belt that has delivered and sustained the clash regime until today – the most important signposts in history that have created our current predicament – not in order to overhaul the screws and bolts of that system of course, but in order to disassemble its constituent parts. To that end, I wanted to go back and to see how ‘we’ and ‘they’ were constituted during formative periods of human history, for instance during the ancient wars between Persia and Greece, the emergence of Islam, the Enlightenment and modernity, colonialism and the contemporary ‘wars on terror’.
How do you characterize the structural violence apparently informing and underlying the clash regime?
I was not surprised to encounter many clash disciples along the way, on all sides; many individuals endowed with immense resources who wrote and made history in a divisive mode. I was rather more surprised to see how systematically perfect the clash regime has been reproduced in the classroom, in our language, in the media, in domestic and international politics; to see how overbearingly detailed we are coded to think about difference until today. There is a huge cultural apparatus of Orwellian proportions that induces us with ideas prone to legitimize conflict and war. This is a primary factor of the structural violence we are facing on a daily basis.
The title of Chapter 2, “The Temptations of Grammar”, bears allusion to Jacque Derrida’s Grammatology and his theory of “differénce” and “deconstruction”. What do you mean by “grammar” here? And what are its primary “temptations” in the theoretical framework of clash regime?
The allusion to Derrida is rather implicit and remains so throughout the book. But I thought it necessary, beyond history, to look at the way the clash thesis has been assembled grammatically. The way we speak to and about the ‘other’s is very important in creating boundaries. Language is complicit in the myth of separation. Conversely, language could also create empathy towards the other and yet I don’t see much of that in the international media, in the pamphlets of politicians and in the mainstream discourse in the social and human sciences. So I had a look at the way some of those writers, scholars and politicians adhering to the idea that the ‘west’ and ‘Islam’ are inherently incompatible assemble their narratives. It was interesting to see that they revolve around a grammar that creates a seemingly unbridgeable distance between subject and object, a style of writing that detaches the in-group (we, us, the nation, west, Islam etc.), from the out-group (they, them, the nation, Islam etc.). Typically, one encounters sentences such as ‘Islam is …’ or ‘The west is …’, ‘We are …’ and ‘They are …’ etc. Then there is a causal link: ‘We are what we are because …’, ‘They are what they are because …’. Thus, the territory between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is cleansed. Within such a grammar and syntax, there appear no linkages, no common field to mitigate and negotiate difference. As such, a common language of empathy based on the acknowledgement of commonalities is systematically negated.
In the book, you talk of the attempts to “objectify” the clash of civilizations theory, to materialize it. Do you mean to imply that the clash theory lacks an objective historical basis and is founded upon a “myth” turned then into “pseudo-reality”?
You are entirely right that there is no objective historical basis for the clash idea. And yet there are many people who believe in it. So simply because something is a myth it doesn’t mean that it could not be politically effective and ideologically persuasive. You mentioned Foucault. He has been ambiguous on the issue of ‘objectivity’, which is why I bring him into dialogue with Herbert Marcuse who had a better understanding of the socially engineered ‘materiality’ of ideas and institutions and their ‘introjective’ force. Every idea, including the idea that we are embroiled in an inevitable conflict between Islam and the ‘west’, is concocted. But once a concoction is institutionalized, once it commands its own syntax and grammar, its own disciplinary apparatus and ideological coherence, it is out there, it claims material substance. As such, the clash of civilizations is a ‘quasi-reality’. It is there external to us, and it affects our thinking on a daily basis. In order to combat it, it doesn’t really help to avoid focusing on the myths it has been built upon, but to debunk them, to erode the foundations upon which the clash regime has been erected. This is one way to write a counterhistory to the clash, an oppositional discourse that fosters engagement and rational dialogue. I have been impressed by the recent publications of Jack Goody (The Theft of History; Renaissances: The One or the Many?) and John M. Hobson (The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation) in that regard. In their studies, they have created a powerful case for multiple modernities, a common Islamo-European field and a critical approach to the canons of History.
In your deconstruction of the clash theory, you have historically departed from the ancient Persian-Greek wars and moved through the Crusades to Colonialism and War on Terror, and drawn on a vast spectrum of intellectual repertoires from Marxism and Critical Theory – Marx, Adorno and Marcuse – through post-structuralism – Derrida and Foucault – to Islamic philosophy – Avicenna and Farabi. What is the significance of incorporating ideas from Islamic philosophers, which appears the most innovative and appealing aspect of your deconstructive antithesis?
Again, much of this stems from my amazement that there has not been a truly comparative field encompassing political theory that would bring together the writings of thinkers in east and west. There are still too many people out there who believe that there is an unbridgeable difference between philosophy and political theory as it emerged in Europe and North America on the one side and western Asia and North Africa on the other. I think that such compulsive disciplinary cleanliness is part of the problem. Enter critical theory which I take to encompass post-positivist theories that are openly promiscuous, cross-cultural, and potentially cross-theoretical as well. And suddenly, Farabi can meet and greet Hegel, Adorno salutes Khayyam and the poetry of Rumi entices the political philosophy of the British or German romanticists. Now the book can’t sustain the claim to present a thorough theoretical treatise that would bring all these thinkers together, but perhaps it creates the possibility to do so in the future. At least this is what it has done for me. I feel those thinkers have a lot to say to each other, and yet they are kept apart by sanitized social and human sciences that have been built around false notions of archival purity and civilizational authenticity. To bring in classical Islamic philosophy was an experiment I started in my previous book (Iran in World Politics: The Question of the Islamic Republic) and I continued it in this one. I found it immensely rewarding to ‘pollute’ the archives so to say and very useful to disassemble those colossal monoliths called the ‘west’ and ‘Islam’, not in order to obliterate them, but to establish that Muslims and Europeans, Arabs and Americans, easterners and westerners have been a part of a common historical experience. Moreoever, Farabi and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) offer a beautifully hermeneutical understanding of the world that is very different from the worldview and politics of many contemporary Islamists. Yet they claim the same Islam. How could that be? What happened to political theory in the Islamic worlds? How did we get from the progressive thought of Ibn Sina in the tenth century CE to bin Laden today? How could we have kept those giants out of our heads and governing systems? How did we get from the Bayt al-Hikmah, ‘the house of wisdom’ where ancient Greek philosophy was preserved, disputed, reinterpreted, and Islamicised to the doctrinal madrasas of today? Mowlana (Rumi) reflected on the self, the individual and our common humanity over two centuries before the Renaissance in Italy. Why did we relegate him to the archives or to poetry nights? Outrageous, is it not?
The UN named 2001 the year of “dialogue among civilizations”. Ten years later, Mohammad Khatami’s world-known notion appears to have failed, seemingly buried in history. The failures of the Obama administration’s policies towards Iran and the voicing of the failure of multiculturalism by various European leaders reinforce the former. What way or strategy do you suggest out of the clash predicament? What features in the “Art of Engagement” between “us” and “them”?
I agree that there has been regression and that this regression is occurring during a period that prides itself on being the most progressive in human history. The corporatization of universities, the emergence of a predatory form of capitalism and al-Qaedaism in the Arab and Islamic world are some of the rather more recent developments that have hampered the emergence of a politics of empathy. As for ex-President Khatami: He failed exactly because he made his call for a dialogue among civilizations as a politician and not as a politically disinterested figure; the politics of Iran did not allow for his grand theme and the ‘west’ wasn’t really interested in his overtures. Khatami even suspended Iran’s nuclear enrichment just in case the dialogue among civilizations theme was not enough, and he was rebuffed by the European Union who did not follow up on their promises. This was one of the main factors for Khatami’s demise and for the resurgence of the rightwing in Iran. Of course, the foreign policies of the United States and Iran are not necessarily based on civilizational allegiance, but on what the political elites of the countries consider to be the national interest. And yet the frail body of the nation-state, both in the United States and in Iran, is too often burdened with a civilizational discourse in order to legitimate ‘leadership’. In the case of the United States, the recent wars that the country waged always also had a civilizational component; the Vietcong, the Iraqi army, the Taleban were/are presented as barbarians who have to be subdued by force. It is no coincidence that the target of imperial wars is always evil, that the ‘other’ is dehumanized. A civilizational discourse incubates an insidious form of hegemonic superiority, most of the time with racist undertones. Soldiers have to be persuaded into pulling the trigger, they have to have a great deal of animosity if not hatred of the other side. What makes matters worse, at least from an ontological perspective, is that the mainstream theories of international relations, (neo)realism at the helm of them, rationalize war as a normality of international life. There is no respite, kill or be killed, perennial anarchy; that is thought to be the inevitable and ahistorical essence of the international system. We can’t get away from conflict, or so we are told. The last chapter of the book attempts to add to the counter-cases to such pessimism. It refutes the logic of war and the calls for homogeneity, authenticity, undisturbed identity underlying the clash regime. To that end, I experiment with those fields of human endeavor – poetry and music, for instance – where dissonance does not beget conflict, where difference is mitigated, where the poetry of Omar Khayyam can be interpreted as a critical theory of the subject. So while it is necessary and prudent to acknowledge analytically that there continues to be a cultural system, a clash regime that negates dialogue and engagement, it is equally true to acknowledge that there have existed movements towards a counter-regime.
Finally, how do you perceive the current Arab awakening in the Middle East? How should it be explained? In liberal democratic or Islamic terms? Or should we move beyond these seemingly clash-oriented binary categories and seek an alternative, integrated, multifaceted, and inclusive framework for analysis? Does it really demonstrate the delusions of the “end of history” and instead represent the birth of “a new geography of liberation” as Hamid Dabashi has suggested?
Yes well, if Fukuyama thought that Hegel’s Owl of Minerva descended in his garden and brought about the end of history, he was mistaken. The second sentence of your question is crucial. The immensely important events in the Arab world are not reducible to one factor and they are certainly not driven by one all encompassing ideology. Some forms of Islamic politics are there, but we are not witnessing Islamic revolutions. Communists, secularists, liberalists are all a part of the process and none of the actors has been able to monopolize the political process yet. Indeed, the majority of the demonstrators are not driven by a coherent ideology. They do not protest for God or Marx, but against earthly matters, against corruption, dependency, subservience, indignity, torture, oppression. So whereas political activism in the ‘west’ is subdued, many people here really seem to be nauseated by mortgage ratings and soap operas, an intrusive and unjust economic system that codes them in so many microscopic ways that they hardly see it. I mean it is not the abundance of social justice that confines political activism in the ‘west’, is it? So whereas politics is monopolized largely by the state and its underbelly here, the Arab world is embroiled in a great experiment of participatory democracy, direct democracy that has created new hope for the future. But for a new geography of liberation there needs to be more than hope. At this stage, the people have created an opportunity, but not the systems and discourses to carry their project forward. It seems to me that in Egypt, for instance, a true break from the past can only be achieved if the most potent institution of the state, i.e. the military, itself is democratized. For the moment, it seems to me that this has not happened yet. But there is no need to be pessimistic – vigilant yes – but certainly not dismissive of the achievements that have already been attained. In terms of our subject matter, it is encouraging to see that these upheavals are not steeped in a clash mythology, that there is no inherent anti-westernism in all of this. Al-Qaeda is lurking in the background, and they are a factor in eastern Libya, but the vast majority of the people in the Arab and Islamic world despise their destructive ideology. That does not solve al-Qaeda’s problem with the ‘west’ of course and vice versa. And then there is the wars in Pakistan and Afghanistan which have created a new armada of orphans whose experience in life has been framed by death and destruction. The UN reported that over 2,700 civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2010; the war is entering its 11th year, there is still a nascent civil conflict in Iraq, the issue of Palestine has been almost entirely muted, Bahrain has been turned into an island of fear with Saudi complicity and western acquiescence and there are NATO aircraft bombing Libya. So surrounding the Arab spring there is a geography of violence in which the ‘west’, as an idea and an institutionalized military machinery, is entirely complicit. The pathologies of the past continue to hunt us.
Conducted and edited by Maysam Behravesh, e-IR’s Iranian Studies Editor.
http://www.e-ir.info/2011/04/27/a-metahistory-of-the-clash-of-civilizations/
Interview by Kourosh Ziabari
The allegation that Iran is developing nuclear weapons is a mirage: Arshin Adib-Moghaddam
Dr. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is a political commentator and lecturer in the comparative and international politics of western Asia at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He was born in the Taksim area of Istanbul to Iranian parents and raised in Hamburg/Germany. He studied at the University of Hamburg, American University and Cambridge. He is the author of The International Politics of the Persian Gulf: A Cultural Genealogy, Iran in World Politics: The question of the Islamic Republic and A metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations.
He is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Cambridge's European Trust Society and he was the first Jarvis Doctorow Fellow at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford.
His articles and commentaries have appeared on Guardian, CNN, Monthly Review, Independent, Open Democracy, Antiwar and Daily Star. His scholarly papers also have been published in "Critical Studies on Terrorism", "Cambridge Review of International Affairs", "Third World Quarterly" and "International Studies Journal."
Dr. Adib-Moghaddam's latest book "A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations: Us and Them Beyond Orientalism" was published in 2011 by the Hurst & Co. and Columbia University Press.
As described by Amazon.com, "Adib-Moghaddam's investigation explains the conceptual genesis of the clash of civilizations and the influence of western and Islamic representations of the other. He highlights the discontinuities between Islamism and the canon of Islamic philosophy, which distinguishes between Avicennian and Qutbian discourses of Islam, and he reveals how violence became inscribed in western ideas, especially during the Enlightenment. Expanding critical theory to include Islamic philosophy and poetry, this metahistory refuses to treat Muslims and Europeans, Americans and Arabs, and the Orient and the Occident as separate entities."
He joined me in an in-depth interview and answered my questions regarding the continued controversy over Iran's nuclear program, the Western media's black propaganda against Iran, the future of Iran-West relations and the prospect of Iran's Green Movement.
What follows is the complete text of my interview with Dr. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, political scientist and author.
Kourosh Ziabari: Over the past years, the United States and its European allies imposed several rounds of UN-authorized and non-authorized sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. The general policy of West towards Iran brings to mind several questions. First of all, I would like to ask you, as a political scientist, that why is Iran singled out over its nuclear program? Who has put forward reliable evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, or has the intention to do so? Does the West's hostility toward Iran simply emanate from Iran's nuclear program? If so, then why did the former U.S. President George W. Bush label Iran as part of an Axis of Evil under President Khatami who was a reformist and open-minded politician?
Arshin Adib-Moghaddam: You are right, and one has to stress that on every occasion, lest the lies that led to the invasion of Iraq will be repeated: There is no evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapon. No IAEA report, not even national intelligence agencies hostile to the Iranian state such as the CIA and the Mossad in Israel have provided any evidence to that end. So the nuclear weapons allegation is a political mirage, a tactical manoeuvre to outflank Iran on other matters.
I think Chomsky is right when he says that it is Iran’s insistence on an independent foreign policy that is being punished. The allegation that Iran is developing nuclear weapons is a Trojan horse to legitimise the comprehensive sanctions regime and to contain Iran’s regional power. Having said that, I don’t believe that Iran is facing a coherent ‘western’ block. Even in the United States, where the image of Iran is professionally manufactured by anti-Iranian lobbying groups, there are differences of opinion on how to engage the country. There is a difference between Barak Obama and George W. Bush. In Europe too, we have been engaged in fostering a different kind of approach to Iran, one that is not reliant on myths, but the reality on the ground.
The fact remains that Iran is a regional superpower with influence in all the hotspots of the region. The sanctions policy, the policy of containment has largely failed. It has not changed Iranian behaviour on strategic matters. If anything, the politics of aggression has emboldened the rather more hawkish elements in the Iranian state, because it is them who thrive on the rhetoric of confrontation. You mention the axis-of-evil speech of George W. Bush. It came after the reformist President Mohammad Khatami made major concessions, offering support for the war against the Taliban in the aftermath of the terror attacks on 9/11. President Khatami went out of his way to offer medical support to US pilots who would be downed on Iranian territory, a major confidence building step. It was reciprocated with the axis of evil speech, one of the most disastrous and murderous foreign policy speeches in the history of the United States.
It should also be noted that Khatami suspended the enrichment of uranium in response to a deal with the European Union. But the EU, under the sway of Tony Blair and others, did not adhere to their side of the bargain. This was a major diplomatic blunder. Khatami was left with nothing. The right-wing in Iran was quick to capitalise on the situation. It was then when the Ahmadinejad faction accused the reformers of selling out the national interest of the country. With nothing to present, Khatami was robbed of a counter-case. Here he was talking about a dialogue amongst civilisation, condemning calls for the death of America in Iran, suspending the enrichment of uranium, supporting the campaign against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, reaching out to the American people on CNN, only to be demonised and placed along Saddam Hussein and Kim-Jong Il in the axis of evil.
But there is no time to reminisce or to be apathetic. The apostles of war are preaching again and they are taking their orders from Netanyahu. It is an ongoing battle. They are inventing myth in order to advocate military aggression. We are working on the truth. They wield sword and sceptre above our heads. We stick to the pen and the lectern. Theirs is a case of hate and destruction. Ours is geared to peace and reconciliation. Their conscious is pragmatic, ours is principled. We resist, they exercise power.
Ziabari: Israel is the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Several international organizations including the Federation of American Scientists have confirmed this fact. Why doesn't the international community, especially the United States and its European friends, take action to legalize Israel's nuclear program and investigate its atomic arsenal? Why doesn't Israel comply with the UNSC resolution 487 which called on Tel Aviv to put its nuclear facilities under the IAEA safeguards?
Moghaddam: From a legal perspective, there is a nuance of course. Israel, like Pakistan and India never signed the Non Proliferation Treaty. But let’s leave that aside for a moment, for it doesn’t really answer why the Israeli state is treated different than the Iranian government. It is ironic that Israel has done everything Iran is accused of: Iran is accused of terrorism; Israel openly admits that it pursues a policy of assassination all over the world. Iran is accused of meddling in the affairs of Arab countries; Israel has launched two invasions against them in the past five years killing thousands of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon. Iran has been accused and sanctioned for developing nuclear weapons without any evidence; Israel has nuclear weapons and boasts of close trade ties with the United States and the European Union. Moreover, Israel is the only country in the world that colonises territory in clear violation of international law and under the auspices of the ‘international community.’ This is called the ‘settlement policy’ in the official jargon of the Netanyahu administration. Not even the condemnation of President Obama, important in its own right, changed the situation. So Israel is what Iran is punished for. It should be said that there are many dissidents in Israel itself that disagree with the policies of Netanyahu and the strategy of colonisation of Palestinian territory.
So far Israel has been shielded from international law by successive US administrations. It is the veto of the US that prevents any serious UNSC resolution against Israel. When it comes to Israel, and consequently western Asia and North Africa, the United States continues to be hostage to the pro-Israeli lobby in the country. However, the tide is turning. There are signs of a progressive counter-discourse gaining ground. Obama and Netanyahu are at odds, let there be no doubt about this. And there is resistance to the influence of the Israeli right-wing on US domestic politics and foreign affairs. But for the moment the political elites in the US are not sufficiently independent to think in terms of their national interest in western Asia and North Africa.
I have argued in "A metahistory of the clash of civilisations" that justice in world politics is the surface effect of a series of constellations that can be manipulated towards particular ends. So justice is a product of politics and diplomacy rather than an objective value that is universally applicable. At the same time I reject the notion that world politics has to be anarchic, that the Hobbesian idea of a war of all against all is inevitable. It was Europe and then the United States that constructed and supervised this unjust order. It is not due to some kind of natural law. So it can be changed. The Israeli nuclear programme must be seen within this larger context of an unjust world order that continues to produce hypocrisies on major issues facing human kind. I mean, it is not as if we could detach from all of this. Politics affects everything we do, from birth to death, cereal to nightgown. The reform of the international institutions must do away with the hierarchy inscribed in them. One way of dealing with this would be to turn the UNSC into a rather more representative body that would reflect the emerging non-western world order.
Ziabari: The sanctions of the United States and European Union against Iran have targeted Iran's medical sector, oil and gas industry, energy sector and even automobile and food industries. Ordinary Iranians are deprived of having access to the most rudimentary necessities of their daily life as a result of these crippling sanctions. Tens of patients suffering from chronic disorders die each year because the foreign firms don't allow their products to be exported to Iran Even the reformist leaders Mehdi Karroubi and Mirhossein Mousavi have condemned the crippling sanctions of the West against Iran. What's your idea? Aren't these sanctions some kind of violation of human rights?
Moghaddam: There are two assumptions in the question that I would like to challenge. First, I think the Iranian economy is doing well if we take into consideration that the country has been under international sanctions for three decades now and that it is absorbing the ‘baby boom’ generation after the revolution. There are many problems of course, unemployment, inflation, economic mismanagement, etc, but the macroeconomic indicators of Iran – economic growth, foreign direct investment – are sound. Recent reports by the World Bank, UNCTAD and the IMF indicate these positive economic trends quite clearly.
After all, Iran continues to be an affluent country. From my own experience in Iran there is no shortage of medical provision and the country continues to have an intricate and wide ranging social welfare system with several foundations and institutions that are dedicated to the plight of the poor. They continue to function against all odds. To my mind the sanctions policy has largely failed. A country like Iran with the second largest gas reserves in the world and the second highest production of crude oil cannot be effectively isolated. But I take your point that economic sanctions hurt civilians rather than the state. Especially in the aviation industry the sanctions policy is killing Iranians. In that sense, it is true that they violate human dignity.
Yet I don’t think that the sanctions have in any way ‘crippled’ Iran as Hillary Clinton and others put it. The term crippling is very discriminatory and distasteful by the way, given that many US soldiers come back disabled from the many wars that the US is engaged in. It is even more disrespectful than the so called ‘carrot and stick’ policy applied to Iran, a phrase that is used for donkeys. Terms and phrases like that indicate the discursive violence enveloping Iranian-American relations. It is equally prevalent in Iran, of course, for instance the calls of death to America. To my mind, progressive independence, independence that is not only material, but psychological too, begets that Iran does away with slogans demonising or praising any country.
As for the second part of the question: In fact the Iranian opposition is by far more hawkish on the issue of nuclear negotiations, for they do not hold the responsibly of power. As you know I have never accepted the discourse of human rights as a part of the foreign policy of the state. Human rights are the prerogative of civil society. The state is merely there to execute our demands in that regard. I don’t think any of us need Nicolas Sarkozy to enlighten us about human rights. But it should be said in the same breath that the human rights situation in Iran is problematic. Again, why would we look at the representations by the ‘west’ in order to assess how we treat each other? Isn’t this a form of dependency? And does it not invite the other side into Iranian affairs? What we need is a transparent, legally grounded policy of human rights that defines the dignity of Iranians and their rights within the context of the social, religious, cultural and ethnic realities of contemporary Iran. An autonomous human rights shura, if you want, not in order to present Iran as a particularly tolerant country to the outside, that would be an automatic side effect, but in order to assess why there are so many complaints about the human rights situation in Iran by Iranians living in the country itself. The weakness of the system in this regard has serious national and international repercussions. The national security of a country starts with the nation— the citizenry which is the most precious commodity for the security of a country. The revolution was quite clear on this aspect, the centrality of the "tudeh", "mardom", the "ummah". Surely, we are not saying that other countries are responsible for the dignity of the Iranian people? There is a splendid excursus by Ali Shariati on this matter, on the differences between "bashariyat" and "insaniyat" between being human in biological terms and humaneness. "Insaniyat" or humaneness requires caring for the plight of the ‘other’, the hamsay-e or neighbour with whom we literally share our shadow, "ham – saye". I have used this differentiation of Shariati to criticise the inhumane treatment of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq by the US army. I don’t mean to sound too dramatic but I believe that we need the discourse of insaniyat in Iran today, probably more than ever.
Ziabari: Your articles and commentaries have appeared on several mainstream media outlets and you have been in close contact with a number of them. Don't you believe that all of these media outlets have an anti-Iranian approach which prevents them from maintaining impartiality and objectivity? Don't you trace the footsteps of a concerted anti-Iranian propaganda in these media? Why don't they ever write anything of Iran's rich and sophisticated culture? Why don't they ever write anything about Iran's scientific progresses? Why don't they ever write about Iranian artists, scholars and scientists and the richness of Persian culture and literature? What we read of Iran in these media is simply confined to Iran's alleged sponsorship of terrorism, nuclear program and violation of human rights. Why is it so?
Moghaddam: No I don’t think so. I certainly don’t see a concert of anti-Iranian propaganda. It is more of a cacophony. By that I mean that there is no government or agency that could control every aspect of the international media, otherwise the demand for some of my writings would not penetrate the mainstream as you put it. So I don’t think there is some kind of a conductor when it comes to the media concert on Iran. There is no monolithic coherence or a consensus that is all-encompassing. There is a real difference between Fox News and CNN, and there is a difference between The Sun and The Guardian of London. But it is true to say that there are many people shouting, and that the megaphones are readily available. It is surely easier to get published with a story that is anti-Iranian, rather than one that aspires to objectivity.
But the reason for that is not an all-encompassing conspiracy, but the composition of the mainstream media in the ‘west’ itself. At the margins there is room for dissent, but the bulk of the news stories have become a part of what Theodor Adorno aptly called a ‘culture industry’ decades ago. This culture industry reacts to market forces by far more than it reacts to the truth. As a current example: Here, in the UK the government of Prime Minister Cameron is currently grappling with a major corruption case involving several newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch’s company News Corporation. There have been arrests; Murdoch and his son had to appear in front of a parliamentary commission and so on. The allegations range from bribery of police officers who leaked information to journalists to the illegal hacking of phones and computers. It is a right mess. Murdoch co-owns Fox News together with the Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal. Murdoch also owns The Sunday Times, The Times, and several tabloid papers. So there is a concentration of power here that creates its own political economy of truth. This is unhealthy for a democracy and it is unhelpful to understand complex countries such as Iran.
But again, from a critical perspective, and in this case it means self-criticism, one has to ask why it is so easy to write nonsense about Iran and why it is that Iran’s image is so far removed from the reality? I don’t think that the power of the mainstream media is analytically possible without the absence of a functioning counter-discourse. Why is the international media not flooded with experts from Iran itself? How many of Iran’s cultural attaches in the embassies do their job properly? How many conferences do they organise on the media representation of Iran? How much outreach is there? And what about the media landscape in Iran in terms of its international appeal? An image can only be manipulated if the resistance to that manipulation is not sophisticated enough. To put it in simple terms: Iranians in Iran are the best authors of their narrative, highly educated, internet-savvy, most of them truly brilliant, it is just a matter of disseminating their message, so that there is a second opinion on the country.
Ziabari: The critics of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad believe that he isolated Iran in the international community with his harsh policies and uncompromising stance, especially with regards to nuclear issue. They say that Iran has other important priorities than nuclear program and should not sacrifice its position and prestige in the international level by insisting on enriching uranium which is a sensitive issue for the Westerners. What's your take on that?
Moghaddam: Success in international diplomacy is not merely dependent on the demand, in this case enriching uranium on Iranian soil, but on the way that demand is packaged. It is not what is in the package that is determining the reaction, but the way it is enveloped.
President Ahmadinejad stands accused of using the wrong wrapping paper. His rhetoric, his demeanour his overall discourse has been largely anti-diplomatic and confrontational. The Supreme Leader was quite aware of this at an early stage of the Presidency which is why he nominated a foreign policy council to oversee his performance. In that sense President Ahmadinejad is quite comparable to George W. Bush who was equally inept to articulate the national interest of the United States, which is why he plunged the country into a political and economic mess. Having said that, Iran is not isolated per se. Iran continues to be supported by those countries who are preparing for a new world order that will be distinctively multi-polar and non-western. The initiative of Turkey and Brazil is indicative of the future, the emergence of China as a global player is probably the most important factor, and the Arab revolts are very consequential too.
The puppets are falling and the puppet-master is running out of characters. The shah, Ben-Ali, Mubarak, their primary sin was that they were considered to be subservient to external demands. It was their colonial mindset, the notion that they simply can’t do it on their own that sealed their fate. The Iranian revolution has to be seen as a step in the direction of a multi-polar world order because it offered an alternative to superpower politics. In fact, the Cold War in Iran ended with the revolution.
Ziabari: The United States and Israel have long advocated a regime change in Iran and used every opportunity to sabotage Iran's security by supporting terrorist groups such as PJAK and MKO or assassinating Iranian scientists and high-profile politicians. Don't you believe that those Iranians living in Diaspora who support these American-Israeli efforts are betraying the cause of their compatriots living in Iran?
Moghaddam: To my mind, those fanatical opposition activists who cheer everything that is going wrong in Iran are delusional. They deserve compassion, not vitriol. Exile has a strange effect on the mind. It creates a dangerous duality. In terms of their mental habitat, many exiles continue to live in Iran. Yet because they are not there, everything that happens there appears in slow motion to them. They can’t keep up. You can take the individual from Iran, but you can’t take Iran out of the individual. Iran is like a magnetic nodal point that draws you in. It is really difficult to escape the lure of the country. Now if the duality of the exiled mind is not tempered with a good dose of reason, it creates a split personality, cultural schizophrenia in Dariush Shayegan’s words.
The idea that "they" have taken away "my" country from "me" turns into the idea that I have the right to take it back now. Iran is traded as a commodity that can be owned, rather than a bond that we all have to invest in, in order to yield results that are non-discriminatory. I don’t think, however, that any Iranian condones the murder of innocent scientists in their homeland.
There aren’t many of those delusional opposition activists left really, apart from the handful who have set up their satellite TV stations in their basement and who don’t really have serious influence on anything that is being said and written about Iran. But ideally, even they would be included in an extended parenthesis behind the meaning of contemporary Iran which would safeguard the right to contribute to the future of the country. Such a vast parenthesis would encompass all of those who identify themselves as Iranian, irrespective of political orientation, ethnic background, religious loyalties etc.
You are an Iranian if you say so, who am I to deny you the right to be one? Such an understanding of Iran as an open ended idea has a central function: It turns the politics of the country, including the dialectic between the Diaspora and Iranians living in Iran, from an antagonistic mode to an agonistic process of mutual acceptance, from the zero-sum politics of today, to the positive-sum policies of tomorrow, from the vilification of the political enemy to the acceptance of him/her as a legitimate competitor. The Iranian self, the "khodi" has always been cosmopolitan and politically promiscuous. Unless this reality is accepted, the politics of the country will be decided on a limited ground that does not encompass the transnational vastness of the meaning of Iran. After all, Iran transcends, that much we can all agree upon. Hence, a politics of transcendence, the maximal autonomisation of the meaning of Iran is merited.
Ziabari: The European Union has recently taken the name of MKO off its list of terrorist organizations. Moreover, MKO was legalized in the United Kingdom on 24 June 2008, six months after winning a court battle over its legality. The U.S. congressmen are also making efforts to persuade the government to remove MKO from its terror list. What's your estimation of this action? Isn't it contrary to the claims of the American and European politicians who usually boast of their loyalty to the Iranian people and their support for the freedom and democracy movement in the country?
Moghaddam: Of course it is. The MKO is a terrorist sect with rigid organisational structures that would make any fascist rise in applause. But why is the case against Iran easier to build than the case against other countries, for instance Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia or Nicaragua, states that are allied to Iran? This is the real question that the political elites in Iran need to address. And then there is a second responsibility for what is happening: The primary reason why the MKO can act is the vacuum left behind by Iranian diplomacy in the last years. We can’t start the analysis with the effect. We have to look at the causes. Where are the cultural attaches protesting against the activities of the MKO? Where are their outlines for concerted PR campaigns that would reveal the atrocities that the MKO committed? How many international conferences have been organised on the links between the MKO and Saddam Hussein? Why is this little organisation an issue in the first place?
What is needed in order to safeguard Iran’s national interest is a politics of friendship and reconciliation that stretches as far as possible to the realms of international diplomacy: state to state, state to society, and most importantly civil society to civil society. The dialogue between societies encapsulates the true essence of the term dawat that was so central to the libertarian aspects of the Islamic revolution. Inviting the ‘Other’ to listen is a virtue. Obviously an invitation requires a language that is empathetic rather than confrontational. As a Persian proverb has it: betamarg, beshin and befarma all mean sit down, but the polite befarma will probably yield the best reaction.
Ziabari: And my final question is about the prospect of Green Movement in Iran. I strongly believe that the United States and European countries betrayed the Green Movement by explicitly supporting it and giving the hardliners an excuse to associate this reformist movement with the U.S. and Israel. The Western mainstream media also played their own role in this betrayal by portraying Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi as opposition leaders, while they were simply reformist candidates who wanted to implement soft reforms within Iran's current political establishment, not opposition leaders who wanted to subvert the regime. What's your idea?
Moghaddam: I don’t see the causal link between western policies and/or media representations and events in Iran. The politics of the country has its own dynamics. There is too much focus on what the media in the ‘west’ says, as if a journalist in New York has more power to decide the future of Iran than a university student in Tehran. Here, I disagree with post-colonial theorists and the Radical Left who keep telling us that imperial power is all-encompassing. To believe that, is not only analytically flawed but it creates a dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy. As for the Green Movement: it is the reincarnation of previous reform outfits such as the Second Khordad movement named after the date Mohammad Khatami was elected President.
It is the surface effect of the demands of Iranian civil society which will continue to be articulated beyond personalities such as Mousavi and Karroubi who themselves are merely the effects of those demands for reform. And you are right to say that these are calls for reforms to the Islamic Republic and not for a fundamentally new order. At the height of the demonstrations I wrote that they did not amount to a revolution. Most people disagreed. When it comes to the Iran story the degree of hypocrisy and opportunism is staggering, sometimes it is depressing. But one shouldn’t feel helpless in the face of the colossal lies that are being printed about Iran. There is room to resist and to fight for the truth. To my mind, this is primarily an intellectual jihad which requires research, patience and a good dose of cross-cultural empathy. It is not enough to speak truth to power from the outside any anymore. It is necessary to perfect resistance strategies that penetrate power from within. And isn’t this what the brave activists from Tahrir Square in Cairo to Syntagma Square in Athens are demanding as we speak?
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- Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian freelance journalist. He has interviewed political commentator and linguist Noam Chomsky, member of New Zealand parliament Keith Locke, Australian politician Ian Cohen, member of German Parliament Ruprecht Polenz, former Mexican President Vicente Fox, former U.S. National Security Council advisor Peter D. Feaver, Nobel Prize laureate in Physics Wolfgang Ketterle, Nobel Prize laureate in Chemistry Kurt Wüthrich, Nobel Prize laureate in biology Robin Warren, famous German political prisoner Ernst Zündel, Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff, American author Stephen Kinzer, syndicated journalist Eric Margolis, former aSiddiqiistant of the U.S. Department of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts, American-Palestinian journalist Ramzy Baroud, former President of the American Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Sid Ganis, American international relations scholar Stephen Zunes, American singer and songwriter David Rovics, American political scientist and anthropologist William Beeman, British journalist Andy Worthington, Australian author and blogger Antony Loewenstein, Iranian geopolitics expert Pirouz Mojtahedzadeh, American historian and author Michael A. Hoffman II and Israeli musician Gilad Atzmon.
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2011/08/03/the-allegation-that-iran-is-developing-n
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